Advise and Consent (50 page)

“Now, Bobby,” he said. “Don’t get in a huff. I’m handling this all right, I think. It makes me the lightning-rod for all the pressure for a little while, but that’s all right. I can stand it.”

“You can if you don’t underestimate the pressures, and if you have a good explanation for it when the time comes,” Senator Munson said.

“I have one,” Senator Anderson remarked, rather grimly. “As for the pressures, I assume you mean these attacks in the press and radio and TV. That’s just part of this business, it happens to everybody; it just happens to be my turn, at the moment. I’ll ride it out all right.”

“I hope so,” Senator Munson said thoughtfully. “I hope it isn’t any more damaging than that.”

“Who else could damage me?” Brig asked. “The only other one I can think of is the President, and I don’t think he could even if he wanted to. What could he do it with?”

“You’d know that better than I would,” Bob Munson said, and though he thought his young colleague hesitated for an almost imperceptible second, it was with a note of skeptical scorn that he answered.

“Well, relax, Bob,” he said dryly. “There aren’t many skeletons in this closet. Furthermore, the President and I are going to find ourselves pretty much in agreement, I think, as soon as we can get together and talk it out. I think he’ll be agreeable to doing what’s necessary.”

“And what’s that?” Senator Munson asked. Senator Anderson replied without hesitation.

“Withdraw the nomination,” he said, and there was a pause.

“Well,” Bob Munson said after a moment. “You don’t want much, do you?”

“Only what’s right,” Brig said calmly.

“I doubt very much if he’ll be receptive to that idea,” the Majority Leader said. “He read me a lecture on it a little while ago.”

“Maybe he’ll feel differently after I talk to him,” Senator Anderson said.

Bob Munson made a skeptical sound. “That I doubt. He said unless you’d found Leffingwell guilty of a morals conviction or a murder rap or membership in the Communist Party, he wouldn’t budge. You haven’t found any of those, have you?”

“Not exactly,” Senator Anderson said, and Senator Munson said, “Hmm.”

“Serious enough to warrant withdrawal, you think,” he remarked thoughtfully.

“I think so.”

“Well, maybe I will, too, when you tell me what it is,” Bob Munson suggested. His colleague laughed.

“Which will be when I see the President,” he said with pleasant firmness.

“You’re a stubborn cuss,” Senator Munson told him.

“It’s the way I am,” Brig said in a tone that dismissed it. “I’d like you with me, Bob. When can we set it up?”

“I’m going back to the house with him after the White House Correspondents’ banquet tonight for a drink and a chat. He thought you might like to come with me.”

“Oh, he’s already got it set up,” Brig said with, some surprise. The Majority Leader decided there was no point, with Brig, in beating around the bush.

“Yes, except that he expects that by that time you will have changed your mind, canceled further hearings, and come out with a statement to the effect that further study has convinced you the nominee should be speedily confirmed.”

“Oh, he does,” Senator Anderson said in an entirely different voice. “Oh, he does. Are those the conditions on which I’m to be allowed into the presence?”

“No, no,” the Majority Leader said hastily. “Calm down. That only expresses the utmost limit of his fondest hopes. He’ll be glad to see you in any event.”

“No, he won’t,” Brigham Anderson said calmly. “So that’s what’s behind this call. You’re supposed to head me off and then we can have a victory drink on it tonight. His victory. Well, that’s not the basis on which I’m coming to see him, you can tell him for me. Any change in plans I may or may not make will be after I see him, not before. For Christ’s sake,” he added in an exasperated tone, “I’m only doing this to protect him. What in the hell’s the matter with him, anyway?”

Bob Munson sighed.

“You’re making this awfully difficult for everybody,” he said, and in reply his young friend sounded completely serious.

“I’m sorry, Bob,” he said soberly. “I don’t mean to. It just seems to me this way is best, that’s all. I’ve thought it all over, and that’s my judgment on it. I’m trying to do what seems right to me. I can’t help it if this is the way it comes out.”

“All right,” Senator Munson said, deciding to capitulate, at least for the time being. “All right, you do it your own way. We’ll go ahead with it after dinner and you can talk the whole thing out with him.”

“Maybe this will give us all a chance to re-examine our positions,” Senator Anderson said. “Maybe we all need to.”

“Maybe,” Senator Munson said, not sounding very convinced of it “You’ll have some trouble avoiding questions at the dinner, I’m afraid.”

“I doubt it,” Brig said. “I’ll just be pleasant and noncommittal, as usual.”

“As usual,” the Majority Leader said. “Suppose it comes out somewhere else during the day, whatever it is?”

“Well, then I’ll just be justified in what I’m doing,” Brig said. “Look, Bob. I’m only trying to play this by the rules. I’m only trying to protect my gallant leaders, the one in the White House and the one in the Senate. What’s your problem, pal?”

“Someday,” Senator Munson said thoughtfully, “you’re going to go it alone just once too often, Brigham, and it’s going to trip you up.”

“Maybe,” the Senator from Utah said calmly. “Maybe. But I don’t think it will be this time.”

“I hope not for your sake,” the Majority Leader said. “I’ll tell the President you’ll be coming along with me as planned tonight.”

“Not quite as planned,” Brig pointed out, “but I’ll be there. Unless Fred Van Ackerman has led a lynch mob of COMFORT members out here and strung me up by that time.”

“Maybe he will,” Bob Munson said, not entirely in jest “By the way,” he added casually, “is Tommy Davis mad at you about anything?”

“Not that I know of,” Senator Anderson said. “I gave him a ride to work the other morning and he seemed the same as ever. I’m sure he isn’t happy about what I’m doing right now, he’s such a Leffingwell partisan, but I can’t think of anything personal. Why?”

“Nothing, I just wondered.”

“You never ‘just wonder,’ Robert. What’s on your mind?”

“That’s all right,” Bob Munson said airily. “You have your little secrets. I have mine.”

“Bastard,” Senator Anderson said affectionately, and the Majority Leader laughed.

“Come see us at the Capitol someday,” he said.

“I’d rather you wouldn’t advertise it,” Senator Anderson said, “but I’ll be in my office after lunch if you need me. And don’t worry, Robert. I’m doing all right.”

But after he had hung up and gone thoughtfully back out into the yard, there remained in his mind the uneasy feeling that perhaps he wasn’t entirely. Despite his outward calm about the attacks of press and television, he had been somewhat dismayed by the extreme virulence which had greeted him with the dawn. He had realized that many people were emotionally involved with the cause of the nominee, but he had not realized quite the fanaticism that seemed capable of flaring from it at an instant’s notice. He still, after seven years in office, retained some slight, idealistic belief that if you treated people in Washington and the great world of politics and the press fairly, they would accord you the same fairness; he was still shocked occasionally at the extremes of bitterness which often cropped out on what sometimes seemed the slightest of provocations. “You know,” Stanley Danta had once remarked wryly, when his unexpected criticism of some proposal put forward by one of the more popular favorites had suddenly brought an avalanche of personal attack upon his own head, “I think I’ll introduce a resolution to change the motto of the Republic from ‘E pluribus Unum’ to ‘It all depends upon whose ox is gored.’ That would be more fitting, I think.”

Senator Anderson had watched the process involve others, and now it was involving him; it was not pleasant, and basically, although he had meant it when he said it was just something to ride out and he was confident he could, there was a savagery about it that he found very disturbing. The debate over Bob Leffingwell was no longer—if it ever had been—a discussion on the merits; it was now simply a matter of personal attack and personal smear, with no holds barred and no weapons unused where weapons could be found. By doing what he thought was the right and honorable thing to protect the country, the President, and the party, he had apparently tipped over a witch’s cauldron; and as he stood once more gazing thoughtfully about his yard, he wondered with a recurring sense of foreboding that threw into shadow the bright golden day whether he really could emerge without being genuinely and perhaps permanently scalded.

It was in this mood, which was not conducive to relaxed domestic conversation, that he looked up to see his wife and daughter emerging from the house to come toward him over the lawn. Pidge, dressed in bright blue blouse and jumper, looked her most angelic this morning, but he could see that Mabel, whose feelings were always close to the surface and ready to be rubbed raw, was as disturbed as he was. Because he was beginning to find lately that this state of mutual concern led too rapidly to argument, he knelt down and held out his arms, and Pidge with a glad cry hurled herself into them. As he stood up with her blond head and dark eyes alongside his, the sun playing upon them both, Mabel felt as though a giant hand had reached in and squeezed with implacable determination and great pain upon her heart, so touching and perfect a picture did they make together, and so certain was she that there was menace in the morning for them all.

And because she knew her husband would be annoyed when she said what she felt she must, it came out with a certain doggedly challenging air that she knew desperately even as she said it would prompt a defensive and probably hurtful rejoinder. But she couldn’t stop, she felt she had to say it, and she did.

“I couldn’t help overhearing some of that,” she said in the direct, tactless way of people who aren’t quite sure of themselves, when they feel they must come to grips with something unpleasant, “and I wondered if you were doing the right thing.”

“Were you listening on the upstairs phone?” her husband asked pleasantly, and she felt like crying, “No, no!” But with considerable effort she managed a little smile and said, “Nope, I was working in the kitchen, remember?”

“Oh,” Brig said in the same pleasant tone. “I do remember. Pidge, why don’t you run on down and take a look at the goldfish and I’ll come join you in a minute?”

His daughter, who was not the child of two intelligent people for nothing gave him a quick look, gave her mother another, and then turned away with a sunny smile.

“All right,” she said. “Don’t talk too long.”

“We won’t,” Brig said, and for a moment he and Mabel were laughing at the same thing. It passed.

“Now,” he said soberly, “what’s the matter?”

“I’m worried for you,” she said, trying hard to make it come out calmly. “Everybody seems so—so hostile toward what you’ve done, that it just worries me terribly. I just wondered if you really—really had to do it this way.”

“My dearest,” he said patiently, “you’ve known me now, for—how long is it now?—nine years. Nine years, almost ten. Don’t I always do things the way I feel I have to do them? And don’t I always think them over pretty carefully before I move? Of course I must feel I have to do it this way, or I wouldn’t do it this way.”

“You always have an answer,” she said in a remote voice, while somewhere a cardinal called quickly to another and the warm capricious wind rustled the new leaves in the trees, “and it’s always such a—such a
lonely
answer, somehow.”

“Lonely?” he said in a puzzled voice. “How do you figure that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just is. You always do what you think is right, and you don’t care what other people think about it, and if they think you should do something different it doesn’t matter to you, because you know you’re right. And somehow it always seems awfully lonely to me.”

He gave her a long look, and there was an emotion she could not fathom deep in the level eyes.

“I’m not lonely,” he said. “Whatever in the world gave you that idea? I have you, and I have Pidge, and I have hundreds of friends in Washington and thousands out in the state, and more thousands of thousands I like to think, across the country. How could I possibly be lonely?”

“Well, maybe that isn’t the right word for it,” she said, “but—yes, yes, I think it is. You’re always so sort of set apart from everybody, somehow.” And she almost added, “even from me,” but she knew she would cry if she did, so she hurried on. “You take these independent stands and up to now it hasn’t mattered; but this time there seem to be all sorts of pressures involved and forces at work for Mr. Leffingwell that are bigger than anything you’ve ever tried to challenge before. I’m afraid they’ll hurt you if they can.”

“Please,” he said gravely. “Please don’t fail me now when it really does matter. You’ve been a politician’s wife long enough to know that there comes a time sooner or later for everyone in politics when he just has to stand and take it, that’s all. There just isn’t any way out, sometimes. And now it’s come for me. Sure, I could give in to the President, and to Bob; I could make another statement and close the hearings again and say hurrah for Leffingwell and join the mob and do it the easy way. Would you think better of me for that? I wouldn’t think better of myself, I can tell you that.”

“Couldn’t Bob help you work it out so there wouldn’t be any embarrassment about it?” she asked, aware off on the edge of her mind that somewhere a neighbor was running a power mower and somewhere children were shouting happily in the street.

“Yes, he’d like to,” he said dryly. “I’m sure he’d like to. That’s what the President told him to do, in fact.”

“Why don’t you talk to the President?” she suggested. “He seems like a nice man.”

“Oh, Mabel,” he said with a sudden real impatience in his voice. “The President is a nice man as long as it doesn’t interfere with his concept of what he ought to be doing as President. Then he stops being a nice man. That’s the way Presidents are.”